


Eternity and Timeless

by laadychat



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending tho, Mutual Pining, Starts angsty, Zutara, sad zuko, suki the bff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26974555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laadychat/pseuds/laadychat
Summary: They were eternity and their story timeless. Their love so strong, it moved the world, changed it.Their story was filled with ups and downs, with betrayal and affection. With heartbreak and trust.It was always them.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 61





	Eternity and Timeless

Zuko was used to things being too good to be true. Often time, he was right - nothing worked out for him. It was something he had accepted, had now expected.

But not this.

Even if he was used to being abandoned, he hadn't expected it from her. Hadn't wanted to even think about the possibility for fear it would manifest.

But Zuko, the Fire Lord to the once war-driven Fire Nation, should have expected it if his luck was anything to go by. But he prayed, _Agni did he pray_ , that she would always be by his side. But much like the unforgiving and fearsome waves of the ocean, she couldn't be chained, controlled. And he prayed but he didn't tell her that, didn't tell her that her departure would kill a little bit of his hope, of his already battered soul.

He couldn't tell her because he knew she would stay if he asked. He knew she wanted to explore the world without the fear of being chased, wanted to show the world that her people were still alive. And Zuko would support her every decision. Which is why he didn't, why he _couldn’t_.

Did it have to hurt so much, though? Did letting go of the ond person his heart sought out have to hurt?

He loved her- _loves_ her and so he let her go, hoping she would return to his side.

But when it did come down to it, to the final time she stepped into his chamber, he felt his conviction waver. He wanted to reach out, to ask her to stay, to let himself be selfish this once.

He doesn’t remember _how_ but their hushed voices rose steadily, the sad and loneliness in him raging to bitterness and anger. The outrage in her gesture, the accusation in her voice hurt him but it was the guarded look in her eyes, the heartbreak that completely broke him when she walked away.

She was a child of the moon but to him, she was his sun, his light. The day she left his home, left _him,_ a cloud overpast, drowning everything around him in murkiness, in numbness. 

A year has passed and he hasn’t seen the sun.

-

“Zuko, you need to get some rest.”

Rest? He snorted. How could he afford to rest when everything just started to settle? When he was finally respected by his councilmen?

When he no longer have to fight every accusation one of the other nations throw in his face?

“I can’t rest.” He sighs, slumping back against the chair. He has been sitting here all evening, trying to finish all the necessary paperwork that required his attention. He chuckled mirthlessly at that - it was like every paper required his undivided attention.

“Yes, you can. I’m worried about you.” She spoke softly and the concern in her voice was enough to get him to pause, to reconsider. There was only one person who spoke to him with this casualness these days, like a _friend._ And he thanked the spirits every day for her presence.

“I’m fine, Suki.” He gave you a tight smile but when he saw her raised eyebrow, the deadpanned expression of hers, he let the smile drop. He might be able to fool his cabinet members but not her, not Suki.

“In the beginning, I didn’t pry much and now I’m starting to regret that. But Zuko,” She sighed, stepping away from the shadow to sit in the seat in front of him. “You’ve been getting steadily worse ever since our friends left over a year ago. I thought when they visited a few months ago, it would have been fine but it wasn’t, was it?”

He hadn’t spoken about this to anyone - not even his uncle. He knew the older man was worried, but the Fire Lord couldn’t speak about it. Couldn’t voice it out in the open about the gaping hole in his chest, right under his ribs. Staring at Suki now, he knows there wasn’t any way around it. That she realized why he threw himself so much into rebuilding this nation.

“What happened between you and Katara?” She asked, her voice quiet and he couldn’t stand to see the somber look she gave him and quickly glanced away. He remembers that night clearly, he often relived it in his dreams. 

Where did they go wrong?

The attraction they felt from each other started much earlier than one would have expected between supposed enemies. He noticed her the day his ship pulled into the Southern Water Tribe and it only grew from there. The day they went head to head against each other at the North Pole, he felt admiration, as much as it surprised him then. He had considered her an enemy back then but he couldn’t help how proud he was to see how powerful she became.

  
A girl from a tribe with no other benders fought her way through hardship and the misogyny of her sister tribe to learn how to defend herself, to _fight_ in a war that started long before she was born - how could he not respect her, even a bit?

She was stuck in his mind from that day forth.

Then Ba Sing Se, a city that denies the existence of war, happened. She stepped into the tea shop and then he was hardly lonely in his bed. Back then, they had pretended along with everyone else that there wasn’t a war, that they were _normal._

(A son of Agni, a daughter of Tui, arm in arm in an Earth Kingdom city, what part of that was normal?)

What came afterward wasn’t something he dwelled on very often if he could help it. It always brought back a wave of shame, of self-loathe, and as the Fire Lord, he couldn’t spend time feeling these things. 

But then he thought they were fine(as fine as a group of young adults in the middle of war could be) after Yon Rha, after Katara told him _she forgave him._ When they faced his sister, there wasn’t anyone else he could imagine standing right next to him. 

And now, a year and a half later, he was all alone.

When the rest of the group came back a few months ago without her, it was a message to him, he believes. That she wanted nothing to do with him anymore. 

How does he start to tell Suko all of _that_?

“I don’t know what we did wrong,” he muttered, running a hand over his face, feeling the fatigue deep in his bones. “I… miss her, Suki.”

He hadn’t meant to confess that and it left him surprised. He missed her, missed her so much that it pained him to even look at the color blue, to gaze up at the moon on a cloudless night.

“You guys were together.” Her tone of voice meant she was asking - she already knew and he felt the corner of his lips tug.

“We never said so officially, never made any promises to each other. But if there’s is anything I learned from our time, it’s that I am hers. My thoughts, my heart,” he glanced up at the Kyoshi Warrior, a sad smile on his lips. “They belong to her. They always have. They still do.”

Suki nodded but the way her eyes flashed, Zuko knew there was something she was holding back. Just as he was about to ask her about it, she spoke up. 

“Did you tell her any of this?”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? He never told her how much she meant to him, how he was hopeless without her, lost. Is that why she never came back?

“No,” he whispered, tugging his crown off and stared at it. He nearly grimaced at his reflection - when was the last time he didn’t look half-dead? “One of the many regrets in my ever-growing list.”

“Why don’t you write to her?”

He blinked, taken aback by the question. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it before - Agni, if only she knew about the many unsent letters in his desk. And maybe she does, maybe this is why she brought it up. Would sending a letter help? Would she respond back?

Would it bring her back?

With a gentle smile on her lips, Suki nodded, as if to answer all his questions. “Right before coming here to be your personal guard, she told me something. You didn’t ask her to stay.” 

_How could I,_ he wanted to ask, staring down at his lap helplessly. Should he have asked her to? Should he have told her how much he wanted to sleep every night with her in his arms, in a bed too big for just one?

She stood up and came around the desk to rest a hand on his shoulder. “Write to her and tell her everything you told me, Zuko.” With that said, she slipped back into the shadows, back into the position of his personal guard. 

_You didn’t ask her to stay._

_She didn’t ask to stay_ , he wanted to shout, wanted to cry. But then he thought about the days leading up to the dangerous night - she did ask, didn’t she? In the way, she curled up against him in the night, the way she always stuck by his side when he wasn’t feeling the best, when she asked about their future. 

She wanted him to ask her to stay.

Staring at the blank piece of paper in front of him, he abruptly stood up and walked away.

_She wanted to stay._

-

It took him a couple of weeks to finally write a letter, to finally gather the courage to send it. It wasn’t perfect but he had written it in a spur and before he could opt out, had asked for it to be sent. He doesn’t know where she was at the moment - was she back at her Tribe? Or was she traveling? There wasn’t much he could do about that when the firehawk took off. He had to have faith that the little creature would find the shining beacon that was Katara, Master waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe.

But after a couple of more weeks of waiting with no response, he was having second thoughts. Doubt, that ugly, nasty thing he was trying to smother, grew with each day he didn’t see the firehawk. 

_‘Maybe she is traveling frequently?’_ Suki had said but it did little to uncoil the veins of dread threading around his bruised heart.

It did give him a sliver of hope, though. It meant the messenger animal was still looking for her if it hadn’t returned yet.

But all that hope vanished the day the firehawk came back with nothing around its neck. The only possibility for that was something he refused to think about, to let it fester his doubt.

Staring at the bare animal, he couldn’t deny it. Katara, the woman his heart longed for, did get his letter but wanted nothing to do with him. 

The animal fluttered away, back towards the message both towards the bottom of the palace and with it, Zuko’s last composure.

He crumbled before reaching his bed and grabbed onto his chest. _It hurt, it hurt so bad._

“I’ll cancel your meetings,” Suki whispered but Zuko didn’t pay attention, couldn’t pay attention to anything but the way his inner flame seem to burn through his whole being, through his very soul.

He doesn’t know how long he stood there, numb and so very, very tired. His servant came in a couple of times to convince him to eat or drink but Zuko couldn’t stomach anything. It wasn’t good for anyone to seem him like this but he didn’t care at the moment. He wanted to be selfish just one more time - didn’t he deserve that much at least? There wasn’t much he asked for.

When a knock came at his door, he ignored it. But it kept going on and on and on and finally, when he was about to snap, the door cracked open and-

No, he must have been dreaming. It _must_ be a dream because the person standing at his doorway, staring at him with those-

Are the spirits punishing him? Punishing him for asking the love of his life to come back to him? Did he deserve no happy ending, a marriage as loveless as his parents? 

And when she stepped into the room it was as if she cast her own light into his room and _he couldn’t breathe-_

The woman walking towards him was the woman he saw whenever he closed his eyes, whenever he imagined who he would share his life with.

It was _her_ but he didn’t _understand._ The firehawk came back with _no letter_ and-

“Zuko,” she whispered, looking as if she fought her way to be standing right in front of him. But he had no time to think about it as he stood up, afraid that if he looked away, if he _blinked,_ then this would be an illusion, that it wasn’t real.

“Katara,” he spoke just as softly, afraid that it would chase her away if he was louder. But then his hand caught sight of the letter in her hand. The letter that had his official seal-

_His letter._

_The letter asking her to come back to him._

“I’m here,” she walked closer, looking up at him with those sapphire eyes he fell in love with all those moons ago.

Reaching out to her with shaky hands that matched his ragged breath, it wasn’t until she stepped into his embrace, wrapping her own arms around him that he finally believed it. That it really was her and she was here and she was hugging him and-

“You’re here,” he rasped, burying his nose into her hair, tightening his arms, afraid that she would slip away from him once again. Slip away like the passing breeze on a starless night.

“Ask me,” she mumbled into his nightshirt, her tight grip grounding him more than anything else was able to for the past few moons. It was that he noticed the other letter in her hand and his heart, once a shattered mess, started to mend together again. 

He didn’t need to ask her what she meant. 

“Stay, please?”

The clouds receded and for the first time in almost two years, he was able to see the sun again.

-

_Fire Lord Zuko and Fire Lady Katara were revolutionary, extraordinary. Their marriage was the symbol of the peaceful time they were able to guide the world towards. They were powerful - the most powerful people in the world - but that was not why they were so well respected. It was their compassion, their love for their people and the world, that was always spoken about even generation after their peaceful passing. They were heroes of a war started long before them, they were much too young when they joined the fight for peace. Not a place is left untouched by their hands, each corner of the world remember the royal couple in their own ways. But there are two holidays still celebrated in remembrance of the peaceful era they left behind._

_The 25th of the 6th month to celebrate the day of their passing. It was old age that took them, each during their slumber, the oldest of their group of War Heroes. Only two days apart, it was the day in the middle that was declared this special holiday. It was the day summer starts in the Fire Nation, the day it is declared winter in the Southern Water Tribe._

_The 2nd of the 12th month is the day of love. The day Fire Lord Zuko and Lady Katara had pushed the world into a new path - the day they vowed to stay by each other’s side for all of eternity. The marriage between the son of Agni and the daughter of Tui and La. It is a day to remember all those we love, all those we miss. It was with their example that the world was able to open up to love once again. That hate was no longer a driving force. A holiday so great, it takes a whole week of celebrating, of remembrance._

_They took a broken world and with the help of Avatar Aang, Lady Toph Bei Fong, Chief Sokka and Chieftain Suki of the Southern Water Tribe, they fixed it one stone at a time._

_And it started with a letter._

  
  


_-_

_Katara,_

_~~I miss you~~ _

~~_How are you_ ~~

_Not a day goes by without thinking of you. There was so much I wanted to tell you, so much I should have told you._

_There is no one else I can imagine by my side, no one else I want by my side. You are the owner of my heart, of my soul and I regret never telling you this._

_I regret never asking you to stay._

_Is it too late to ask you to come back? To come back to me?_

_Forever yours,_

_Zuko._

_-_

_Zuko,_

_I'm coming, my love._

**Author's Note:**

> Second one shot of the week for no reason? yeah 😌 because i ship zutara so hard, no cap. also wrote most of this while half asleep so i apologize for grammar mistake lmaoo


End file.
